Neoliberalism, Theatre and Performance

Andy Lavender

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429576133
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Categoria: Historia y crítica teatrales

Neoliberalism, Theatre and Performance tackles one of the most slippery but significant topics in culture and politics. Neoliberalism is defined by the contributors as a political-economic system, and the ideas and assumptions (individualism, market forces and globalisation) that it promotes are consequently examined.

Readers will gain an insight into how neoliberalism shapes contemporary theatre, dance and performance, and how festival programmers, directors and other artists have responded. Jen Harvie gives a broad overview of neoliberalism, before examining its implications for theatre and performance and specific works that confront its grip, including Churchill's Serious Money and Prebble's Enron. Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink conducts a fascinating discussion with Rainer Hofmann, artistic director of the SPRING Festival in Utrecht, on ways in which performance festivals can respond to neoliberal culture. Cristina Rosa explores contemporary dance in neoliberal Brazil as a site for both commodification and challenge. Sarah Woods and Andrew Simms discuss and present excerpts from their activist satire Neoliberalism: The Break-up Tour.

Slim and elegant, forceful and wide-ranging, Neoliberalism, Theatre and Performance is an accessible resource for students, practitioners and scholars interested in how neoliberalism both suffuses and is resisted by today's contemporary performance scene.

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Neoliberalism, theatre, performance, inequality, and alternatives

Jen Harvie

DOI: 10.4324/9780429199974-1

Edited transcript of a lecture | 26 March 2018 | Lyric Hammersmith, London

Link | www.digitaltheatreplus.com/education/collections/digital-theatre/neoliberalism-theatre-and-performance-a-lecture-by-jen-harvie

In this lecture on neoliberalism, theatre, and performance, I start by outlining what neoliberalism is and why it has been widely criticised as socially detrimental, especially for the ways it widens and deepens inequality. I then consider why neoliberalism is important to think about in relation to theatre and performance, exploring how they have been damaged by neoliberalism’s priorities, and how plays, performances, and theatre workers have countered some of its worst effects. My core concern is with the social problems neoliberalism has been seen to cultivate, especially problems of inequality, an apparently inevitable consequence of neoliberalism’s blinkered commitment to free market competition. I argue that theatre and performance are important sites for both highlighting neoliberalism’s problems and challenging them, especially through modelling alternative practices of social engagement that draw less on competition and more on collaboration and solidarity.

Neoliberalism

First, what is neoliberalism? The Oxford English Dictionary (OED 2015) defines neoliberalism as ‘a modified [or new] form of liberalism tending to favour free-market capitalism’. That definition relies on understanding what liberalism is; so, what is liberalism? There are many definitions of the word ‘liberal’, several of them radically different, all with the Latin root ‘liber’, meaning ‘free’. I will focus only on the meaning of ‘liberal’ that ‘neoliberal’ draws on. This meaning operates in political and economic contexts and describes an attitude that favours ‘individual liberty [and] free trade’ (OED 2015). The emphasis on individual liberty means liberalism advocates for the freedom of individuals to do what they want. The emphasis on free trade means that economic markets should be unrestrained by state intervention, state ownership, and state regulations such as tariffs, taxes, and laws, allowing individuals and their businesses to do what they want.

This understanding of liberalism enjoyed popularity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its emphasis on individual liberty supported movements which advocated for the popular dispersal of power and for taking power away from the state and other authorities of the times, including monarchies, monarchical monopolies, state religions, and class systems built on hereditary and aristocratic privilege. This liberalism informed anti-monarchy, pro-republic revolutions in Britain in the late seventeenth century, and in the United States and France in the eighteenth century. In many ways, this liberalism had an importantly democratising effect, diminishing the power held by ruling elites and distributing it more broadly among more people, enhancing equality.

So if neoliberalism is often accused of exacerbating inequality, what changed between that democratising liberalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the neoliberalism that operates today? Where those earlier incarnations had emphasised the ‘individual liberty’ element of liberalism, nineteenth-century liberalism was especially associated with free market or laissez-faire economics. ‘Laissez-faire’ means ‘let do’ in French and, in this context, it suggests letting markets, businesses, and business people do what they want without government interference in the form of trade tariffs, taxation, state ownership, and other forms of regulation.

Neoliberalism is generally understood to affiliate less with the socially democratising tendencies of liberalism’s earlier versions and more with the emphasis on laissez-faire economics of the nineteenth century; what’s ‘neo’ or new about it is that it takes free market economics further by very actively supporting them.¹ This form of neoliberal capitalism really began to take hold in the 1980s, under many global neoliberal stewardships, across South America, in Australia, and famously through Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and President Ronald Reagan in the United States, both of whom were strong advocates of capitalism in a Cold War context that pitted capitalism against communism and socialism. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘capitalism’ is ‘an economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state’.

In neoliberal capitalism, often referred to simply as neoliberalism, the emphasis is especially on the liberty of capitalists and capitalism to seek the most profit. Its defendants would say it is not intrinsically an unjust system since it is designed:

• to stimulate competition, making it efficient;
• to generate profit, jobs, and increased demand as more workers earn money;
• and to serve not only the captains of industry but all its workers, who enjoy its trickle-down benefits.

(I will come back to the arguments of its detractors.) Neoliberalism is both an economic approach and an ideology or way of understanding the world. It organises state policy, and it also radically affects people’s daily lives, because it has become an organising principle that influences not only governments and markets but also such things as schooling, work, and law – possibly all aspects of our lives.²

Neoliberalism’s social implications

That’s what neoliberalism means technically, but what are its social implications, how do we see them affecting theatre and performance, and how do theatre and performance respond? I address this by focusing on some key ideas: first, individual liberty, and second, market dominance and competition.

Individual liberty

While the emphasis on individual liberty has historically helped to disperse power and enhance democracy, it is now seen by many as damaging to democracy because neoliberalism’s approach to it reinforces elitism, enhancing inequality.

It does this because neoliberal governments and societies do not ensure that the conditions in which people exercise their ‘individual liberty’ are equally free or fair for everyone. Instead, neoliberals tend to promote meritocracy, where power or liberty goes to those with the most merit. A meritocratic approach is supposed to ensure what’s called ‘social mobility’, enabling all people to ‘climb a ladder of success’, no matter what their origins, provided they try hard enough. Ideas of meritocracy resonate in the American Dream but are powerfully held in many predominantly capitalist societies, including the United Kingdom at least since Thatcher’s time.

On the surface, meritocracy might seem to be a fair and even desirable approach to social organisation; however, there are a number of problems with it. First, who decides what ‘merit’ is? If it includes, for example, charisma and the ability to self-promote, it will likely prefer people who have been socially trained to be confident over those socially trained to see themselves as second-class citizens. In other words, implicit ideas of merit in meritocracies are often exclusive, reproducing and reinforcing hierarchies run by a ruling elite rather than dismantling them. I am thinking here of hierarchies of, for example, class, gender, race, disability, age, sexuality, and more.

A second, related, problem with meritocracies is the issue of who has the best opportunities to achieve and demonstrate their merit. In the unregulated markets of neoliberalism, the people most likely to achieve and demonstrate their merit will be those with the best access to both excellent education and helpful social connections, or what French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called ‘social capital’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 119). In other words, meritocracies tend to favour people born into structures of economic and social privilege. Despite highly publicised exceptions, it is not as easy to be a self-made person as neoliberals would have us believe. Hierarchies of advantage and disadvantage are structural; it’s not that an individual doesn’t try hard enough to succeed; it’s that some people live in social, material, economic, educational, and other structures that disadvantage them more than other people.

So, an important critique of neoliberalism is that while it claims to support everyone’s individual liberty, it actually supports the liberty of those best placed to succeed; it doesn’t expand democratic power or social mobility, it contracts them; it doesn’t spread resources amongst more people but concentrates power, privilege, and resources in the hands of a few who are already privileged. Neoliberalism’s advocacy of meritocracy exacerbates inequality, it reinforces elitism, and it damages diversity. You might ask: if it’s so awful, why on earth is it still dominant? It persists because its myth or dream that everyone has a chance at success is so powerfully cherished by so many. American cultural critic Lauren Berlant (2011) describes this as a condition of ‘cruel optimism’, ‘when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing’ (1). The dream of neoliberal success is desirable for many; but believing in it reinforces neoliberalism, which actually exacerbates inequality.

Reproducing privilege in theatre and film

Neoliberalism’s effect of privilege reproducing privilege is very familiar in theatre, film, and television in debates around representation. In the film industry, the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite was started in 2015 by social activist April Reign in response to the paltry number of Academy Award nominations for people of colour. Reign argued, ‘It’s not because there’s a lack of quality films that star or feature people of color’ (in Murphy 2015). She noted that those who vote on Oscar awards ‘are 94 percent white, 76 percent male, and the average age is 63 years old … and they might not be as interested in seeing Selma’ (Selma is a 2014 film about the American black civil rights movement directed by African-American Ava DuVernay and starring black British actor David Oyelowo). Reign’s point is that those in power in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences tend to reproduce their own power, whether consciously or unconsciously. Similar criticisms have been made about gender, class, and other aspects of identity and representation in film, television, and theatre. Recent work by sociologists in the UK (Friedman, O’Brien, and Laurison 2017) has shown that actors from working-class backgrounds are significantly underrepresented in the profession, and this is not for lack of effort: it’s structural. The greatest roles and rewards continue to go to actors with class privilege, thanks to the advantages of family money and social networks, directors’ entrenched tendencies to typecast, and attitudes which privilege particular accents, especially Received Pronunciation.

To play the devil’s advocate, I might ask: how is the economic approach of neoliberalism producing these social problems? I have tried to show how neoliberalism’s particular ways of supporting individual liberty are based on ideas of meritocracy and that meritocracy is inherently unfair because it doesn’t interrogate its own values, rules, privileges, or structures. Furthermore, neoliberal capitalism favours industries that are unregulated. An unregulated neoliberal capitalist theatre industry is likely to keep making casting and award decisions that are unequal, unfair, and, for many, less interesting because fairness is not its core concern; profit is. By contrast, a theatre market within a social democratic tradition – which combines capitalism with state intervention to promote social justice (Miller 2005) – might do some things that are more socially just. It might insist on quotas for fair and diverse representation. It might offer additional training to those who haven’t had the opportunities the social elite have had. It might work fundamentally to revise ideas about...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Neoliberalism, theatre, performance, inequality, and alternatives
• 2 ‘What the hell is water?’ The arts festival and the free market
• 3 Neoliberalism and contemporary dance in Brazil
• 4 Neoliberalism: The Break-up Tour